http://itip-gmbh.eu/en/products/inmath/

http://www.mathmagic.com/product/pro350.html

Um, I think the poster meant how to do it w/o spending $400 to $600 on a separate math editor program.....

If I recall, Math Type can be bought as a separate program, when you do, it gives you the option of exporting equations as EPS images. Then, you can simply place the equation as an EPS graphic in a page layout program like ID. I'm pretty sure it's less than $100 for those with educational discounts, though it was back with Word 6/Mac OS 8.5 when I did this.

You should be able to do this through saving Word document as a pdf, there is a free plugin from Microsoft to do that. If I am not mistaken, this way we prepared our math booklet.

The only problem with the pdf approach is that you lose maximum resolution compared to saving it as EPS, no? If you create the equation in Word via Equation Editor at the EXACT same point size you wish it to appear in ID, then you'd be OK with the pdf approach I guess. But if you ever needed to resize the graphic, you'd potentially have problems if ultimately printing to a high resolution device.

> saving Word document as a pdf, there is a free plugin from Microsoft to do th

Can you point me to this?

I know that you get a PDF plugin for Word when you install the full version of Acrobat, but I was not aware of any free plugin from MS.

I asked my typesetting colleagues a very similar question about three months ago, and got the following reply concerning their current workflow from Word files to InDesign:

For Journals which are set in InDesign, we were so far setting the equationas as fixed graphics and using them as images during composition. With this process the equations cannot be edited directly from InDesign. As a recent development, we are planning to export the equations directly from MathType Equation Editor and embeddin gthese within InDesign. Any corrections can be done from InDesign itself by double clicking that equation which opens up MathType Editor. This will be implemented shortly.

...Now, I don't know whether that did happen (yet) ... it sounds like the Equation Editor file is an OLE object. Does InDesign support OLE?

[edit] Adobe's "Help resource centre" seems to confirm that it doesn't... in which case I wonder how my colleagues were planning on implementing the above.? [end edit]
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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

Can you point me to this?

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=4D951911-3E7E-4...

Thanks for that Serge. My school is on Word 2002 right now, but when we get moved up to Word 2007 then it might be useful.

I've had a reply from my typesetting colleagues, who say "We have developed scripts to link MathType objects within InDesign file. Using this scripts we can edit / save the equations within InDesign" ... I get the impression they're not going to be more forthcoming than that, but it sounds like forking out for the full version of MathType (which, as Ryan says, isn't too expensive) will get you part of the way there.

Don't forget if you go down the PDF route there are third-party freeware utilities for creating PDFs (if you're prepared to put up with nag screens) - I used PDF995 until my company stumped up for Acrobat - so you shouldn't have to wait for the upgrade to Word 2007 just for the MS plugin...

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Ever since I chose to block pop-ups, my toaster's stopped working.

I had to do this a few times a year or so ago. I would place the equation in an empty Word document (legal-sized landscape worked well) and then resize that to about 3x the print size (Word still treats it all as vector data, so the resize is no problem). Export that to PDF (used Adobe PDF exporter for Word, but PDFCreator works well, too). Save a copy of the Word doc in case you need to make edits/corrections later, and then just place the PDF into InDesign as you would any other image. Since it's oversized, it'll look perfectly fine when you scale it down to regular size.